Unbelievable
by hushedgreylily
Summary: "So yes, I know that love is unconditional. But I also know that it can be unpredictable, unexpected, uncontrollable, unbearable and strangely easy to mistake for loathing..." Oneshot for Castleland challenge on Lj.


_"So yes, I know that love is unconditional. But I also know that it can be unpredictable, unexpected, uncontrollable, unbearable and strangely easy to mistake for loathing..."_

It had started just after they'd finally closed her mother's case. She hadn't even had the excuse that Josh was in Africa, he'd only been on the night-shift, but her emotions had been running too high for her to even realise she was batting her eyelids back at Castle and agreeing to go up to the loft for a nightcap. She'd shared a drink with the rest of the team in the Precinct, there was something fuzzy about her head, and with the man responsible for Johanna's death looking at a life sentence, she felt suddenly like she was wandering. Her tunnel vision, all that determination, it had all fallen away, and she didn't feel quite like herself, but like someone else in her own body.

She'd been about to leave, and he'd stood up with her, and they'd ended up too close, and all of a sudden, without warning (although she should probably have taken warning from the kiss in the parking lot months before, the way he felt against her, the ease with which she had pressed her lips to his), completely unexpected, she found herself in his arms. She'd like to think she'd been reluctant, she'd like to think Josh had even crossed her mind that night, but once that dam was broken between her and Castle there seemed to be no stopping them – it was _easy, _being with Castle, everything seemed to slot into place.

Naturally, however, the bizarre clarity she'd felt at the touch of his mouth, the lean lines of his body, the heat of his skin the night before dissolved in the morning and she'd run, snatching clothes from all across his apartment, slipping out in her heels from the night before, hair still slightly mussed and guilt making it difficult for her to swallow. She'd told herself it had been the alcohol; it had been the adrenalin high, it would never happen again.

That argument fell through after their second and third nights together, always wordless, always in the dark, and never spoken of the following morning. If she could have taken a step outside her life for a moment and seen herself, she would hardly have recognised the woman standing on Castle's doorstep at some unearthly hour in the morning, the woman sneaking from his bed before the sun had climbed in the sky – but there was something unpredictable about the shade of Kate Beckett she became around him, something altogether different to anything she'd ever been before.

Silence became her mantra, a complete refusal to talk about it to anyone. Even Josh, when he returned from Africa, didn't get a full confession out of her, although she made it quite clear that they were over – because admitting the feelings inside her, the desire Castle was stirring in her; that was too much for her to handle.

That was the thing, though; she couldn't define what she was feeling for him. For moments, in the dark of night, it was pure desire, completely uncontrollable, all skin on skin and _taste _and forbidden things. Occasionally, when her day had been impossible, when she or Ryan or Esposito had been in the line of fire, when she'd had a case she couldn't solve, it was near enough unbearable, the need she had to be with him. When she called a cab in the mornings, earning curious looks from drivers, makeup usually smudged and clutching a cup of coffee, it was strangely opposite, nearing loathing, even. Her hands would shake around the coffee cup, vowing as she did every time that this wouldn't happen again, that Richard Castle wasn't good for her, that it wasn't _fair, _what he could do to her simply by raking his eyes all over her, drawing her ever nearer.

When he takes a bullet for her, though, she finds she has to stop miss-labelling it. Throwing her across a parking lot (coincidentally not four blocks away from where they shared their first kiss) without a thought for his own life, letting a bullet tear through his flesh just below his shoulder, only inches above his heart, with eyes still searching her out, checking her over for injury – she can't push that into the box where she's concealing the way he looks at her, the way he whispers her name into her ear in the dark, how tenderly he runs his fingers along the side of her face if he ever catches her before she leaves in the morning, how she can always see him biting down questions about their future because he knows her well enough to know she's nowhere close to ready.

She screams at him when they first let her into see him when he wakes up, eyes still bloodshot from tears she's been denying, screaming until she's blue in the face about Alexis and Martha and him not being a cop and her needing to keep him safe, and he does nothing but clutch her hand and not let go. She yells something about not knowing what she'd have done if he hadn't have made it, and then, with the same spontaneity they'd shared on that first night together, she finds herself curled against him on the edge of his bed, lips affixed tightly to his.

There are no questions after that, they've all been simultaneously answered; there's no doubt that this is permanent now, there's no doubt that this is more than sex, and they've been more than friends with benefits for a long time.

It's everything it was before, infuriating, passionate, excruciating, surprising. But it's different too, tender, domestic, comforting. And then it's unconditional.

And Kate Beckett finally admits she's in love.


End file.
